"Some brands need to be left to die an honourable death."
I'm old enough to remember Old Helmut Lang and the anticipation you'd feel each season before he showed. The brand had such strong signatures but Helmut Lang always managed to surprise you with ingenuity, skill, intelligence and wit; to reinvent himself, push himself further, challenge you. The perfect suits (no one has cut a meaner two button single breast since), the perfect jeans, the perfect heel, the Perfect Perfect. And then came the whimsy and craft: controlled decoration, subversive use of colour and materials, exquisite dresses -- trimmed with feathers one season, layered and draped with knit the next, unconventional, defiant, modern and gobsmackingly beautiful. Lang still feels relevant today and casts a very long shadow.
So to say that this offering from Peter Do was sub-par feels almost unfair so it must be judged for what it is -- a somewhat frustrating and hollow show with questionable colour-blocking, gimmicky styling and an over-reliance on Raf Simons own Langian riffs during his Calvin Klein tenure. The big problem here is not what was presented (passable) but what was missing.
A lot.